Ambazonia War:

Girl Worries Over Fate of Her Parents And Siblings

Hundreds of people have fled their homes in Anglophone Cameroon

Cameroonian student residing in the USA has said that she will sue the government of Cameroon over the burning of their family house in Manyu division and the arrest of her siblings and other members of her extended family by the Cameroonian government soldiers.

            Tambe Hannah Besong, who travelled abroad for studies in 2017, has told The Median that she has remained inconsolable ever since news got to her that their family house in Cameroon was burnt and her parents and siblings taken away by soldiers, who accused them of harboring Ambazonia terrorists and of aiding and abetting the commission of acts of terrorism by the latter.

            Hannah Besong says efforts she has made to talk to her parents through a lawyer in Cameroon have failed. She says she is also worried about the whereabouts and safety of her husband, Atem Neelesh Takor, who was also arrested but succeeded to escape from hospital where he was taken to be treated of the life-threatening injuries he suffered from the deadly torture he got from the hands of the pitiless soldiers. 

             “I left Cameroon on 16 September 2017 to Addis Ababa Ethiopia for a Masters Program in Global Studies with special emphasis on Peace and Security in Africa. The program was jointly sponsored and run by the Institute for Peace and Security Studies/Addis Ababa University and the Global and European Studies Institute University of Leipzig, Germany. Whilst in Germany on a scholarship in continuation of the program, I applied and was admitted to participate in the UN ECOSOC Humanitarian Affairs Annual Meeting for Young People in humanitarian action June 2018 conference in the United State of America. While in the USA, on 22 June 2018 at about 10 p.m, I received a call from Cameroon saying that my family has been arrested and our house burnt to ashes by Cameroonian military. I was told that the only person who survived the arrests was my mother in-law, who was in the farm at the time of the arrests. My interlocutor said the soldiers accused my parents of harboring secessionist terrorists,” recounted Hannah Besong in a message she sent to our newsroom.

            Hannah Besong has vowed never to set her feet again in Cameroon, which she calls a “fucking” and “wicked” country.”

            But she says she will never find peace until she secures the release of her parents and siblings from where ever they are being kept. She plans to take her case to the United States government.

            Meanwhile, Hannah Besong says she has already engaged lawyers in Cameroon to bring a case against the government of Cameroon on charges of arson and illegal arrest and detention of her family members.

            It is left to be seen how her case against the Cameroon government will prosper giving that the every government has the republican and sovereign responsibility to take any and every action possible to preserve peace and integrity within its territory, especially whenever these are threatened. And this is the argument the government has been advancing ever since it was criticized of burning villages and arresting ‘innocent citizens’.

            It should be recalled that sometime in 2017, government soldiers in what many have described as collective and desperate reprisals, raided villages in Manyu division and burned houses and carried out mass arrests. This was after some unidentified gunmen who claimed they were fighting to liberate Southern Cameroons (which they now call Ambazonia) from annexation and assimilation by the government in Yaounde, attacked and killed some security officers posted in some localities in the division notably Kembong, Akwen, Agborkim German and Otu.

            Because of the military reprisals, many villages in Manyu are now completely deserted of their populations as people have fled into the bushes or crossed over to neighbouring Nigeria for fear of being arrested or killed.

            It is not known for how long the ongoing crisis in the two English-speaking regions of Cameroon will last especially as the crisis has now transformed from street protests to a full-blown civil war.

            The UN Refugee Agency UNHCR has so far counted over 200.000 internally displaced persons in Southern Cameroons and over 60.000 Cameroonian refugees now facing humanitarian crisis in the western neighbor, Nigeria.